


The Little Things

by 221b_hound



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Brothers, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Permanent Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-17
Updated: 2012-06-17
Packaged: 2017-11-07 22:38:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/436215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone asked for Mycroft whump on the kinkmeme. The full prompt is: I'd like to see Mycroft getting seriously injured/ill in a way unrelated to one of Sherlock's cases. Maybe he's in an accident, maybe related to *his* line of work. The injuries are not life threatening but potentially life changing.  Sherlock then looks after him (graciously or not, up to you)</p><p>And then I did  a really horrible thing to Mycroft. I feel kind of bad about it now. But at least he got cake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Little Things

Such a little thing. A moment’s distraction, a minor miscalculation, a second’s hesitation. Hand resting on the door of the car, pleasantries exchanged with one of the usual guard (keeping it professional, yes, and a little distant, but cordial, very nearly friendly, a few well-placed words to make a good man feel valued).  Manners cost nothing, but the returns could be astonishing.

Mycroft should have stepped away from the curb, or stepped into the car. But it was only a moment, an investment in loyalty.

Hand resting on the door of the car, fingers curled slightly inward around the rim, and he said: “Blainey, good to see you. Wife quite recovered from the birth?” And Blainey had beamed.

And then, glimpsed in Mycroft’s peripheral vision, the cyclist is distracted by the pretty girl with the gently oscillating breasts, veers in front of a car, and the car jerks to one side, swiping a cab, and the cab lurches and swerves to avoid a motorcycle, and in swerving it mounts the footpath, bounces across the little traffic island, crunches into the government car on the side facing the curb. The cab isn’t going fast, as these things go, the driver had been breaking, a good driver, knows what he’s doing…

But the cab crunches to a stop, a foot or two from the man standing at the door, but into the join between the door and the back panel, and the momentum, the short, sharp stop, and the weight of the cab combine, and the door smashes shut on the hand resting, curved so elegantly around the frame.

And then pain. Excruciating and exquisite.

Phalanges: distal, intermediate, proximal. Metacarpals. Carpals.  Muscles: intrinsic and extrinsic. Mashed together to a splintered pulp.

Outside the screaming pain there is Blainey, roaring orders, two strong hands on his shoulders, cradling him, holding him still. Outside, Mycroft can hear someone dialling an ambulance, speaking to the dispatcher. He can hear someone walking through broken glass, and the distressed taxi driver apologising, and a siren, and a shocking groaning and whimpering. When he realises the latter sound is coming from his own mouth, Mycroft clenches his teeth and makes it stop.

Behind the screaming pain, there are calculations. It will be inconvenient. If the hand can’t be saved, terribly inconvenient. He will have to learn to write with his left hand.  And he will have to learn to do up his buttons and fly with only his left hand. And he will have to learn to make soufflé with only one hand.

And he will not play the piano again. And he will not draw again. And the tiny scar, from when Sherlock stabbed him with a garden fork during that unfortunate incident with the drunken gardener which had been an accident, and theoretically in his defence, and Sherlock had only been six, and very sorry, too, but that scar, that brotherly wound, a reminder that they had not always been enemies, that little scar will be lost under the mass of scars, if he gets to keep the hand at all.

Then the ambulance comes, and the oblivion, and Mycroft doesn’t even dream.

For a minor functionary, Mycroft receives access to surprisingly sophisticated health care. They save the hand.  He loses some mobility. He expects to lose enough mobility to lose his prowess with the piano and he doubts he’ll play again; he can’t bear the sound he knows he will make.

He may still draw, though it will take longer to complete a piece. Perhaps he should switch to paint. He may not have the control for pencil and charcoal.

He loses Sherlock’s scar, of course.

Mycroft’s days in the hospital are spent refusing as much pain medication as is feasible to allow him to continue to work. He can’t think flexibly under the fog of drugs, or the fog of pain. He finds a middle ground and wills himself through it. His body is a tool. A damaged tool, but at his command, within its limitations.

Mycroft sends a message to Sherlock when he gets home. Simply: “Visit.”  Sherlock ignores it. Mycroft follows this with sixteen text messages. None of them explain what has happened. He sends nothing but “Meet with me. MH”.  Sherlock replies ‘No – SH’ to the first eight, and ignores every one thereafter.

Then Mycroft calls and leaves a single voicemail message. “Sherlock. I’m at home.” And Sherlock comes.

When Sherlock comes to see him, Mycroft is sitting in his favourite armchair, holding his fine bone china cup, the one Grandmamma gave him on graduation, in his left hand, the right still bandaged.

“I’ll be fine,” says Mycroft, at the look on Sherlock’s face. He smiles, that polite smile he has perfected over years.

Sherlock looks at Mycroft’s face, and his eyes, and his hands, and a dozen other things besides, and flexes his own right hand in conscious empathy. Mycroft can see that Sherlock is thinking of retorts and test tubes and experiments that need two hands; and ridiculous escapades across London; and his violin.

“They’ve even replaced some of the bone and tendons with synthetics,” says Mycroft.

“Modern medicine,” says Sherlock, coolly, “It’s a bloody marvel.”

“More operations to come, of course.”

“Naturally.”

Mycroft doesn’t tell Sherlock why he wanted him to come. Sherlock doesn’t ask. But he sits opposite his older brother. He pours tea. He serves the excellent cake onto a small plate, places the little fork on the china, leans across to place the serving on the wide arm of Mycroft’s chair, so that Mycroft can balance it, and eat it, without needing two hands.

And Sherlock says: “Do you remember the time you stole half the strawberry crop, and that horrid gardener Kebbell took to you with the spade? I grabbed a gardening fork and brandished it at him. I was going through my pirate phase, as I recall. He was hot on your heels, and I had never seen you run before. It was positively fascinating. My attempts at swashbuckling failed miserably, however, and I got underfoot. The three of us came down in a heap, and I speared you with the damned thing.”

Speared was a bit much. Scored, certainly, through the web of Mycroft’s right hand, and he had been unable to play the piano for several weeks. Sherlock, devastated, only just learning the violin, had played for his brother during his convalescence. Tried to give back the music he’d accidentally silenced. Scales, mainly, and nursery melodies. It had been awful, Mycroft remembered. And wonderful.

“Did you? Oh yes, I remember something of it,” says Mycroft.

But Sherlock knows all of Mycroft’s most secret tells. Even the ones Mycroft doesn’t realise he has.

Sherlock stands to pour more tea, to serve Mycroft another slice of the cake, to help himself to a strawberry, icing and cream clinging to its dimpled red skin.

“I’ll visit again tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll bring my violin.”

 


End file.
